Tuesday, June 25

After years of seeing their ads and postcards, I took the plunge and signed up for Johnson City's Rob-Con. It's a two-day show and a short drive up the road, making for a fine sherbet after HeroesCon.

Heroes is a great show -- a reliably great show -- but it's four days for me to get there, work it, and come back. You have to limber up for it, hop around and shake your hands before getting behind the table. It's a marathon. A show like RobCon is a couple of 5ks each day.

That's not a slight. A thousand blessings on small shows. They are easy to maneuver, more relaxed, and more egalitarian. With fewer tables, there's less chance of getting a bad spot on the floorplan. Again I love Heroes, but with that many tables, inevitably the table assignments approximate seats for a theater; the stars will be in the orchestra and box seats, and the small guys will get the nosebleeds. It's an algorithm of marketing and industry prominence, and nothing fuels my comic ambitions than the hope of getting a center-stage table assignment one day.

Because it comes so soon after Heroes, RobCon is easy to pack for. I only had to order a few replacement prints and restock the snack bag. A lower-gear show is just what I need to wind down my booth piloting until November.

In the meantime, I will make costumes for DragonCon, prepare OUTSKIRTS for a trade release, and make the next OUTSKIRTS story -- a long standalone suggested in the very first issue. More on that later.